That is where this story should probably end, but I feel compelled to say a word about why I wrote it in the first place. As this is being published in web space rather than in meat space, with its finite pages and word quotas, there's no reason why it can't go on.

Here's the question: why are design critics today writing about technology? Why am I, an art historian by training, writing about the Indian tablet computer market? Why are former editors of design magazines jetting off to attend summer school at the Google campus? Why are critics who would once have been satisfied writing about buildings, chairs, Anglepoise lamps, typewriters and other shapely, worldly objects now writing about black-glass oblongs with the same rounded corners and the same greasy finger smears?

Why are we writing about operating systems, user interfaces and “disruptive innovation”? Why, for that matter, is the V&A museum - with its medieval silverware and plaster casts of the Laocoön Group - hosting a talk by the founder of a technology company producing cheap tablet computers?

There are at least three reasons that I can think of:

1. Design is not furniture

Furniture was interesting in the early twentieth century when it was imbued with ideology and notions of progress. It was still interesting in the mid-century when it gave vent to a burgeoning middle class' sense of taste. Now that those same manufacturers have abandoned the middle class to become a luxury industry, Ikea is left to cater to the majority and there is nothing in between. This makes furniture a microcosm of the economy at large, where the rich get richer and the rest get by. That ought to be interesting, except that good taste prevailed where it counts: at the bottom of the market.

Meanwhile, "consumer products" is a dirty word. In the 1950s and 1960s, washing machines and blenders were socially liberating – they saved us time and drudgery in the kitchen that we could spend in leisure. That has long-since stopped being the case, to the point where even consumers are painfully aware of their own disposable culture, built-in obsolescence and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. One cannot endorse such products without either being a stooge or a whore, and so one is left to marvel ironically at their functional overkill.

Commodity fetishism allows us to put you on the couch while we play Dr Freud

We make an exception for a certain kind of technology product because we recognise its massive potential for social transformation – for good or ill – and we succumb to (or are terrified by) that promise. We are addicted to one form of social media or another, and so is everyone we know, and thus we suddenly get that image in The Matrix where humanity is collectively plugged into the machine while supine in the goo. Still, the Arab Spring et cetera.

The truth is that technology feels more alive to us than it did in the days when we dreamed of flying cars because we're witnessing mind-boggling advances on an annual basis now, in our very hands and not in the pages of some pulp comic. The pace of change dazzles us and so critics court geekdom for insights into the new commodity fetishism because, frankly, commodity fetishism allows us to put you on the couch while we play Dr Freud. So we scan the horizon for signs that technology will liberate us even as it enslaves us.

2. The real innovation is happening at the level of code

We don't understand code and we have no desire to, we just know it's happening there, somewhere behind our blackened reflections. Technology, in other words, is where it's at. Critics are desperate to be where it's at. The tangible things are dematerialising. The clocks, calculators and calendars, the maps, books and cameras have been swallowed up by the black mirror. As the artist Michael Craig-Martin said to me recently, "I spent 50 years painting everyday objects, now I just paint the iPhone – and it's not a very interesting object."

He's right. It's a cipher, the black monolith that film director Stanley Kubrick foresaw. It is a design critic's nightmare – the object that is forever evolving and growing more intelligent, more powerful, without appearing to change at all. It is disempowering to those trained in aesthetics and connoisseurship, yet it is empowering in opening up new worlds of human experience beyond what can be appreciated "in the round".

Critics are desperate to be where it's at

Our interaction with the device and our experience of new forms of communication are there for the analysis, even though that's not really what appeals to us. The attraction is the sightline they offer to a higher stratum of power, which leads me to my next point.

3. Tech is where the money is

The financial clout of the tech giants like Apple and Samsung makes Olivetti – let alone Cassina, Knoll, Braun, Vitra and the other industrial leaders of design's mid-century heyday – seem like minnows. That means technology is too important to leave to the technology journalists.

Reading the tech press is like watching rabbits caught in the headlights. They may have bought into Silicon Valley's technological determinism, but that doesn't mean we have to. In fact, the Californian Ideology - whereby network technologies drive libertarianism, roll back the power of government and allow a handful of entrepreneurs to amass untold fortunes - is hardly a suitable replacement for the crumbling welfare state.

The design critic's traditional role is to reveal how objects express the spirit of the age. This depends on understanding technological change, naturally, but it cannot be done without recourse to the question of taste and that slippery customer, beauty. The reason tech journalists fail to present the whole picture is because they invoke Apple's success in relation to innovation, market share and profit, when really the answer is beauty.

Technology is too important to leave to the technology journalists

The problem here is that beauty is what tech journalists call "design", whereas design critics are constantly trying to redeem the discipline from such skin-deep designations. Design, we keep insisting, is not style, it is not the shell, it is the totality, the performance, the very thing itself. Beauty is too easily undermined from within, and thus an Apple computer's beauty must be both internal and external.

So Apple's success is in "design", not just in taste. If Apple's success lies anywhere, it might be in overcoming taste altogether. It has imposed such a universal aesthetic that you would have to be a prude, a radical or a programmer to reject it. Real programmers, you see, don’t buy Apple because they know the guts are indistinguishable from other computers’ and because anyway they prefer a more open software "architecture". Only true initiates, it seems, can exercise their own taste.

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What is with these pull quotes? It is as if dezeen has missed the point of this article and – yet again – succumbed to sensationalism.

Guest

The problem is when you see digital technology in a vacuum; as somehow above and apart from the physical and material world. The printing press had particular physical consequence in the spread of ideas, spreading religion, classical orders, ideas with depth of content. But what happens when accelerated digital media spreads only the most shallow and unethical pornographic content.

It’s telling that you bring up the Arab Spring. At the end of the day, digital media is representational. Images, communication and coding of freedom does not equal its reality. You still need a physical chair to build it on, or a physical computer and 2D screen on which to publish abstractions. “The map is not the territory.”

One cannot escape philosophy as the root of design criticism. David Hume argued that every idea is rooted in particular physical thing. Abstract ideas, language itself is not the actual reality. There are physical things, communication, truth and lies, ethics and consequence.

So when social media creates both transparency and the further polarization, increased dialogue but also cyberbullying, these are problems rooted in the physical responses of particular human beings to technology.

Guest

It’s amazing how the link I came to this article was assuming the 3 points as true. Scary.